Table Of ContentFa s h i o n & s u s ta i n a b i l i t y
Published in 2012 by
Laurence King Publishing Ltd
361–373 City Road
London
EC1V 1LR
e-mail: [email protected]
www.laurenceking.com
Copyright © Text 2011
Kate Fletcher & Lynda Grose
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
ISBN: 978 1 85669 754 5
Project Editor: Gaynor Sermon
Copy Editor: Kirsty Seymour-Ure
Designed by Jon Allan
Picture research by Katelyn Toth-Fejel
Cover photograph by Sean Michael; courtesy
of London College of Fashion
Printed in China
Authors’ dedications:
For Daniella, Matt and Betty (LG)
For Jude and Cole (KF)
Kate Fletcher & lynda Grose
Fa s h i o n & s u s ta i n a b i l i t y
d e s i G n F o r c h a n G e
Laurence King Publishing
4
Foreword: To be Clad
Although few doubt that the fate of the environment has become a major
issue, there is no consensus on the nature, seriousness, or timing of the risks
involved. Most of us believe that other people, experts hopefully, will solve
the problems and we can go on living our lives. Indeed, hundreds of
thousands of scientists and researchers are studying the earth and its systems
to determine what effects industrial civilization is having and what the
limits of human activity are with respect to the capacity of the environment.
These studies include the effect of acid rain on forests, lakes and crops, the
build-up of heavy metals in soils and animals, the increase of greenhouse
gases and their effect on climate and incoming radiation, the loss of
biodiversity including the world’s fisheries, and human and animal
tolerance to the thousands of synthetic chemical compounds that are used
every day in manufacturing, products and food. As critically important as
these studies are, the work of transformation will need to commence
everywhere by people engaged in what they do and know best. It will
depend on shared knowledge, networks, and guidebooks that call upon the
innate instinct of human beings to protect and nurture life. This is the
book you hold.
Lynda Grose and Kate Fletcher pose a critical question: Are there
principles and metrics we can agree upon that are key to a world that is
not only sustained, but also actually restored? Second, with these shared
principles, can we create a framework for change that guides business
activities in the fashion industry, a framework that is practical, scientific,
and economic?
There is no product category that elicits more press and scrutiny, or
has more magazines devoted to it than fashion. Our voluntary attire has
intrigued us since the day we became bipeds, as we are the only animal
that changes its skin every day. We clad ourselves to be warm, cool,
beautiful, functional, professional, or alluring. Many a woman and no small
number of men sweat every day about what they will wear and how they
appear, and for good reason. We consciously and unconsciously give great
weight to others’ appearance. Clothing, shoes, handbags and hats are telltale
as to taste, income, class, upbringing, and attitude. Three-sizes-too-big
‘gangsta’ shorts and opening night designer gowns are both chosen
carefully to signal one’s tribe. Hyperawareness of style, cut, fabric, color, and
design is intense and universal, but it has not included the world behind
the rack, the technology behind the cut, the fiber behind the fabric, the
land behind the fiber, or the person on the land. In short, the true impact
of our clothing choices is barely examined or noticed.
In their book, Lynda and Kate have taken a complex industrial
sector and reimagined it as an ecological system, and have done so
employing two lifetimes of applied knowledge and experience. To do so,
they have stepped back from the exigencies of delivering the fall line and
5
have delivered a masterpiece of systems redesign. In all economic sectors,
the initial conversations around sustainability brought forth a sense of
constraint, a foreclosure of material freedom that was to be replaced by
adherence to rigid standards. The idea that sustainability augurs a lesser
world is true in the sense that it calls for less waste, pollution, harm, devastation,
depleted soils, poisoned workers, dying bodies of water, etc. But it does not
portend a monochromatic world of brown smocks and rice. Sustainability
is the forerunner of greater diversity and choice, not less. It offers
meaningful work, greater multiplicity of livelihoods, the reinstitution of
local production, a safer world, and lives worth living. Truly, the worlds of
biomimicry and ecological design presage transformation and innovation
on an order we have not seen since the Industrial Revolution, and it is the
responsibility of those who understand the metes and bounds of natural
systems, both scientifically and economically, to lead the way and elucidate
these possibilities. This is what Lynda and Kate have done so elegantly.
This is not a tome or diktat. It is a carefully researched description of
a system of production being created by designers, textile companies,
manufacturers, and farmers. Call it ethical, sustainable, green, or whatever-
you-wish fashion, it is in the end a call to come home, a description of
how we can come together in a movement to consecrate the habitats and
resources we share and depend on. There are three things we touch upon
every day that greatly impact the world around us: fuel (energy), food, and
fashion. The first two are now wholeheartedly studied and worked upon. It
is now fashion’s turn to inform and dazzle us with what is possible, to
provide the moral imperative to change every aspect of producing and
purchasing our second skin. I ardently believe that humanity knows what
to do once it knows the task at hand. One couldn’t ask for a better
description of what is happening and what needs to be done in order for
fashion to support life on earth.
Paul Hawken
Contents
Foreword by Paul Hawken 4
Preface 8
Part 1: TRANSFORMING FASHION PRODUCTS
Chapter 1: Materials 12
Chapter 2: Processes 33
Chapter 3: Distribution 54
Chapter 4: Consumer care 60
Chapter 5: Disposal 63
Part 2: TRANSFORMING FASHION SYSTEMS
Chapter 6: Adaptability 76
Chapter 7: Optimized lifetimes 85
Chapter 8: Low-impact use 92
Chapter 9: Services and sharing 100
Chapter 10: Local 106
Chapter 11: Biomimicry 114
Chapter 12: Speed 124
Chapter 13: Needs 132
Chapter 14: Engaged 143
Part 3: TRANSFORMING FASHION DESIGN PRACTICE
Chapter 15: Designer as communicator-educator 157
Chapter 16: Designer as facilitator 162
Chapter 17: Designer as activist 168
Chapter 18: Designer as entrepreneur 174
Glossary 183
Endnotes 184
Index 188
Picture credits 191
Acknowledgments 192
8
Preface
This book embodies around 40 years of our combined experience working
with sustainability issues in the fashion sector. In that time we have worked
in the fashion industry, as consultants, in design research, in various
teaching posts at universities and with non-profit organizations. We have
interacted with many groups, from farmers to politicians, artisans to
academics, chemists to fashion business people. Working across these groups
has exposed us to many perspectives on sustainability, fashion and
commerce, all of which have helped form our own philosophies. Fashion
and Sustainability attempts to bring together some of these perspectives and
learning with the aim of igniting action and change.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, one definition of
fashion is that activity that forms, moulds or shapes either material or
immaterial objects. Yet this doesn’t explain all that fashion is. Fashion brings
together creative authorship, technological production and cultural
dissemination associated with dress,1 drawing together designers, producers,
retailers and all of us who wear garments. At its creative best, fashion helps
us to reflect who we are as individuals, while connecting us to wider social
groups, providing a sense both of individuality and of belonging. Fashion is
a connector, linking people across demographics, socio-economic groups
and nationalities; and an attractor, drawing people into a movement for
change. Yet fashion also has a complex relationship with larger systems;
with economics, ecology and society. The repercussions of the sector’s
activities are becoming better understood; and in this book we explore the
potential of leveraging the fashion sector’s relationship with these larger
systems for sustainability advantage.
Our approach to fashion and sustainability throughout this book is
opportunistic. We started writing with David Orr’s question at the forefront
of our minds: ‘What would sustainability have us do?’2 and set out to
explore how fashion might be practised in a world of natural integrity and
human flourishing; and what roles for designers might emerge to help the
sector make that shift. Arguably, sustainability offers the biggest critique the
fashion sector has ever had. It challenges fashion at the level of detail (fibre
and process) and also at the level of the whole (economic models, goals,
rules, values and belief systems). As such, it has the potential to transform
the fashion sector at root, influencing everyone working within it and
everyone who touches fashion and textiles on a daily basis, though too
often the system-transforming nature of sustainability for fashion is ignored
in favour of making more straightforward adjustments to operational details.
This book aims to offer a coherent view of fashion and sustainability
thinking, and as such references some ideas and working examples that
have been presented before. This is deliberate, for it helps show the
trajectory of development in this nascent field, or in some cases the lack of
development or change. The book is divided into three parts, each of
9
which focuses on modifying and renewing the ‘fashion industry system’
sector at different points or places. Each progressively explores and expands
the ideas and innovation opportunities more deeply and broadly than those
that are seen in the industry today. We see each section as part of a
continuum of change offering many opportunities for designer-led
intervention. We favour a multifarious approach to sustainability in fashion,
working both inside and outside the sector and across all parts of the
economy, for there are many points where change can be fostered, and
through collective effort, each change will affect the whole.
Part One begins in a familiar place, exploring the favourable
conditions for transforming fashion products via fibre selection, processing
routes, use behaviours and reuse strategies; and setting out ways in which
the impact of garments can be reduced and their resourcefulness increased.
It often places these actions in context with natural systems, to give a sense
of the complexities at play even as designers make seemingly simple decisions.
Part Two widens this focus further to take in the design of the
structures and the economic and business models that shape the fashion
industry as a whole and starts to define broader opportunities to transform
fashion systems through, for example, adaptability, localism, speed,
biomimicry and co-design. Here the ideas are less familiar, more
challenging and daring, for they often fall outside the current commercial
fashion perspective.
Part Three shifts the focus again, to transforming fashion design practice,
this time exploring a new set of roles in which designers can be cast in a
fashion sector allied with sustainability ideas. Understanding the different
skills necessary for designers to contribute actively to ‘The Great
Transition’3 makes the process of improving the whole an outcome of
individual practice. This part is shorter than the first two, and deliberately
so, for new roles for designers are emerging all the time and we wanted to
hint at their beginnings while allowing space for additional roles to surface.
In the coming years, we imagine all sectors of the economy becoming
rapidly populated by informed and empowered designers, bringing forth
innovations not yet possible even to conceive.
Lynda Grose and Kate Fletcher
San Francisco and London
